Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment

Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds just as they understand the emotional connotations of speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, we report that changes in pitch, rate (i.e., playback speed), and intensity (i.e., amplitude) of environmental sounds trigger emotional responses in 4- and 5-year-old children, including sounds of human actions, animal calls, machinery, or natural phenomena such as wind and waves. This phenomenon was observed for children from the United States and China – countries with drastically different cultural traditions. We discuss theoretical frameworks that predict convergent emotional responses to music, speech, and environmental sounds, focusing on Charles Darwin’s hypothesis that speech and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of environmental sounds.

在人类与非人类动物中，对环境中具备生物学意义的事件做出快速响应的能力，是维系生存与发展的必要条件。已有研究证实，成年人类听众可对环境声音产生情绪反应，其程度不亚于理解言语韵律（speech prosody）与音乐所承载的情绪内涵。然而，学界尚未明确幼儿是否同样会对环境声音产生情绪反应。本研究发现，环境声音的音高、速率（即播放速度）与强度（即振幅）的变化，会触发4至5岁儿童的情绪反应，涵盖人类动作声响、动物鸣叫、机械声响以及风、浪等自然现象声响。这一现象在来自美国与中国的儿童群体中均被观测到——这两个国家的文化传统截然不同。我们探讨了可预测音乐、言语与环境声音引发趋同情绪反应的理论框架，重点围绕查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）提出的假说展开：该假说认为，言语与音乐均起源于一套基于环境声音模仿与改造的通用情绪信号系统。